The book of fragments

As shown
by Christianity itself, America is not united by any one faith.

The book of Habakkuk.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The idea of Christianity as the 'one true religion' is back
with a vengeance. In America the focus is on the Muslim travel ban as it
bounces in and out of court. But we don't need to look outside America or
Christianity to see that this return to evangelical fundamentalism is rotten to
its core.

A very big American story is that of the Christian non-conformists.
This isn't new—it dates back hundreds of years. Certainly, in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries dissenter Christian sects were many and the
practice of exile was widespread. Quakers, Methodists and other groups sailed
to be free to practice in the new world, a world ironically lit up by the
French Revolution's 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite' and, in many cases, slave
ownership.

Like contemporary Muslims they were moving westward to
escape intolerable circumstances. There is something sick about the idea of the
west being 'invaded' coming from people whose ancestors moved west, and this
sickness is widespread.

I put this to friends and one pointed out that the Spanish
settlers may object to being called non-conformists. This is true—many were of
a Catholic orthodoxy. But all over America, the non-conformist story can be
found. Because of this diasporic history, some Christian sects have very
different cultural rituals to the mainstream—polygamy for example, the taking
of multiple wives as practiced by some
Mormon sects.

These examples are very much the anomaly nowadays, but I
haven't heard a raging polemic directed at Mormons lately. I have heard a lot
of anger being directed at Muslims over their supposedly terrifying alien
values. It is, in fact, much more difficult to identify a single orthodoxy
within Christianity than it is to describe its differences. It is also possible
to get to a point where the Muslim religion appears to have more in common with
'mainstream' Christian beliefs than with a Christian sect that practices polygamy.

In the case of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints the repression and abuse of women and girls can be
horrifying. Yet I have heard so many easy lines about the repression of women
under Islam. It is undeniable that in places Islam has a domineering
patriarchal hierarchy, but in the west many Muslims simply get on with their lives
just as Christians and atheists do.

But see how the colonial logic saturates my language? That
there is a Christian 'centre' and outside there are different spectra of belief
to be 'tolerated'. This isn't the case.

A similar narrative to the non-conformist story can be found
within Islam too. Islam, essentially, is undergoing a cultural crisis, and its
crisis has much to do with its settling in the west. But this isn't the whole
story. In Mosul, war is being waged street by street against Isis. Within this
battle there are other, older conflicts, like Sunni versus Shia.

I had the most bizarre conversation last week with someone
who suggested that Islam's inner turmoil and violence was 'primitive,' and that
is why Christianity must be held on to. He went further and suggested that
unless Christianity was defended 'as the one true religion' we would receive a
Caliphate by default.

I reminded him that over in Ireland a blazing religious
conflict dating back to Henry VIII had only recently been extinguished, and
still showed signs of heat. He confirmed this by growing angry, an internalised
rage that now had no outlet because I had blocked its path. This anger is
dangerous—in him, on the right and on the left; in the atheist, the agnostic
and the zealot alike. And I am angry too.

What is being lost in post-truth, specifically, is the
anthropology of religion. The oldest book of the bible, Amos, is constructed from fragments of notes
taken from just a few days of 'prophecies' he delivered. Except when Amos
delivered them he was a shepherd. He was only designated 'a prophet' later on,
and worse, his prophecies were completely hopeless. At least one earthquake
didn't happen when and where he said it would. But to laugh at Amos is to miss
the social function of his 'prophecies'.

When this shepherd stepped out of his wandering existence, the
elites of the region, used to living off the fat of the land, were living off
the lean of the land. The poor simply starved to death. Assyrian rule was
breaking down and there were revolts due to the lack of goods and materials as
supply chains faltered. There were domestic revolts as a result in Assyrian
cities across 763-760 BC.

So Amos went to the temples around him and blasted each of
them with the only rhetoric available to him in the accepted form of delivery
of the time—the prophecy. The content of Amos's speech is not very original. It
has a formal structure very similar to most of the lay preaching of the time.
Remember that ‘The Bible’ did not exist at this point, and the birth of Christ
was the best part of a millennium away.

Amos tells the priests that they are corrupt and blind to
the abuses all around them and that 'for three transgressions as well as four'
they will suffer, as Yaweh (God) will bring wrath upon them. This fourth
transgression is widely interpreted as 'the last straw'. The social function of
this story is little different to a schoolboy explaining to a bully that his big
brother is going to get him, although here it has moved up several scales to a
situation where the lowest of the castes is calling out the heads of what
passed for the state during his time.

But it is never Amos calling out the priests: Yaweh 'speaks
through' Amos. But the formulaic nature of the speaking tells us that this is a
social rite, not a vision. The form of the delivery is part of its social
contract; shepherds can go up to the temple proclaiming that they have been
told by Yaweh to go there, and they can tell the priesthood that Yaweh will
break the fortresses, bring fire and make the bodies of the oppressors pile up
in the rubbish dump and float, bloated, in the river.

This is a very different thing to Amos simply marching up
the temple steps and declaring a takeover. Death would surely follow. The
underlying social contracts of the bible have been lost. The temple elders
can't have angry shepherds murdered every few months either, there really would
be a takeover.

Mary, walking around clearly pregnant and out of wedlock—what
do you do? You invent a story to cover this inconvenient bump in history. Or
more likely, you retrospectively airbrush the history of the birth of the Son
of God with a can of Miracle Gloss.

We might now turn to the Grand Canyon visitor centre, where
fear sometimes makes the dating of the canyon any further than a couple of
thousand years ago rather awkward. Believers see the canyon as evidence of a
global flood, and therefore proof of the existence of Noah, the only pure
individual in a world of sinners who all must die. Creationism and post-truth
are not bedfellows, they are Siamese Twins. We might turn to Creationism in
schools. But when we turn, we might see that the shock now being expressed at
post-truth politics as a new phenomenon covers a much longer incubation period.

The bible that is referred to by fundamentalists is usually
a version of the King James version of 1611. This is also a collage of
fragments, and each fragment, as we can see from the story of Amos, is another
collage. Fundamentalists might have a better time with the Qu'ran, because as
far as we know it has a single author. I refuse to base my understanding of the
universe, or how I live in it, on either book, although both clearly contain
wisdom. Both books also contain things that disturb me. But then so does the
writing of Karl Marx and Bobby Seale.

The point to make is that Christianity is not some settled,
stable or agreed-upon thing, and clearly nor is Islam, despite its story of
sole authorship.

I dislike Richard Dawkins just as much as the peddlers of
miracles. The only intelligent response to existence in the vastness of the
universe is agnosticism, just as the best philosophers understand their lack of
knowledge first and foremost.

But we need the spirit of Amos, and we need the ritual toleration
of the accused. We need new language, calibrated to cut through the suffocating
smog of post-truth, as well as the cut-throat words and deeds of
fundamentalism.

About the author

Dr. Steve Hanson works as a lecturer, writer and researcher. His first book Small Towns, Austere Times, was published by Zero in 2014.

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